Inspirational fruits

You'd be hard-pressed to notice it from looks alone, but there's something special about apricots. Piled up in the market alongside peaches and nectarines, they look like just another juicy tidbit of summery bounty, with blushing cheeks and soft flesh. But unlike their summertime brethren, these Armenian plums are special and far more versatile.

It's the time of year for apricots. That time is fleeting, and in many areas by now, it's already gone. If we turn to a country more enlightened in the capricious ways of the apricot, like Egypt, we see that the bittersweet brevity of meshmesh's annual appearance has been codefied into a common phrase fel meshmesh, or when apricot season comes, used cynically to refer to something that will never happen. Deeper understanding of the apricot's significance requires further investigation into the Near and Middle East, where Western civilization first cultivated the relationship with this Indian stone fruit. The Turkish dote flattery on these 'eggs of the sun' with another quirky idiom, used to describe when something couldn't possibly get better, bundan iyisi Sam'da kayisi, or 'the only thing better than this would be an apricot from Damascus'. Contemporary marketers can only dream of a jingle so pervasive; some brilliant Damascan apricot farmer outdid them long ago.

But it's not all marketing hype. Any fruit can be tasty when it's fresh from the tree, but a better test comes after the journey to preserves. Ask a pastry chef. Pastry chefs love apricot jam. They'll smear it onto anything with sponge cake, and use it as the base for sugar glazes or for making fruit sauces. It's a single-fruit sweet answer to the savory world's ubiquitous mirepoix, and for good reason; the flavor plays well with other fruits without overpowering, and lends a warm fruit twinge to the bright sweetness of plain cane on its own. Oh, and amaretto liqueur? It wouldn't exist without the bitter almond goodness from apricot stones. As if we hadn't had enough from this overachieving little fruit, a compound in apricot kernels called laetrile is used in alternative cancer treatments. Take that, peaches!

On to the jam. I didn't go to Damascus for mine, but the Frog Hollow Farms stand at the San Francisco Ferry Building Farmer's Market was bounding with good specimens of apricot, all worthy of a batch of quality jam. I also brought home some obscenely sweet Candycots, addictive for out-of-hand eating but beyond the scope of my standard jam for today.

After picking up a bag of demerera sugar from Rainbow Grocery, I had everything needed to perform the magic. Follow me!

Ingredients
1.25 kg apricots, to yield approximately 1 kg pitted fruit
1 kg demerera sugar
First, quarter the apricots and set aside the stones.

Weigh your fruit. (I had a little more than my targeted kilo, so I adjusted my sugar to be accordingly equal.)
Place the fruit into a stockpot and pour the sugar on top.

Things will look dry.

Things may look so dry that you'll have fears that adding heat to this mess will result in burning both fruit and sugar in a fiery caramelized mess. Wait for these fears to subside, then turn on the heat to medium.

Stir until the sugar and fruit begin to combine and get melty. Everything will mesh into mush and start bubbling, and you'll see that your fears of sugary inferno were ill-founded. Let things bubble for a good half hour, and feel free to pulverize and mush along the way according to your tastes.

You'll have washed your jars and lids and placed them into simmering baths of water by now, and you'll have a nice clean towel laid on a nearby surface to host the meeting of newborn jam with hot glass. Turn off the heat on the fruity lava. Move the first jar to the toweled surface. Using a funnel or a ladle, or (if you're adventurous and not very safety-minded, a spoon), transport the jam into the jars. Go almost to the top, and wipe the outside rim with a clean moist towel before clamping on the jar lid. Repeat. For our one-kilo recipe, we should fill two standard-sized jars with just enough left over for immediate non-jar use.

I don't know what kind of jars you bought, or what kind of altitude issues you might have, so follow your canning jar instructions to finish your processing. This usually involves half an hour submerged in boiling water. (For your jars, that is. Not you).

And that's it! You now have instant credibility when glazing fruits, moistening cake layers, augmenting ice cream, or sweetening barbecue sauces. Feed that to the next person who tells you fel meshmesh.

Yolks worthy of champagne

The changes in the quality of our food brought on by industrialization can be hard to spot, especially when we consider that many of them happened before we were born. Our great-grandmothers may have known what a farm-raised egg yolk was supposed to look like, but consult anyone much farther down the family tree, and everyone’s using supermarket fare as the baseline for comparison.

If you pry open the Styrofoam on the cheapest carton of eggs at your local supermarket and crack the bleach-white shell to reveal the contents, you’ll see a jaundiced faded Post-It hue that would have shocked your great-grandmother.

It would also have shocked Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin.

If her name doesn’t ring a bell, walk down the aisle to the wine section. You might want to avoid eye contact with the staff after those egg-cracking shenanigans. Really, what were you thinking?

Okay, so walk over to the sparkling wines. See the one on the top shelf, with the orange label? Read the smaller type. Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, the namesake of the champagne brand, chose that orange label in a day long before corporate branding or color matching technology even existed.

In a precedent-setting move, Veuve Clicquot registered this trading color with the French government. And how did she indicate which shade of orange would mean Veuve Clicquot, in a day when Pantone swatches were still 150 years in the future? She turned to eggs.

The famous widow (veuve means widow) specified that her labels would match the brilliantly dense shade of orange unique to eggs from cornfed hens from Bresse. Bresse chickens are renowned to this day throughout France as an ideal specimen, prized for their flavorful and tender meat and clean fat. It certainly doesn’t hurt their reputation in the least that their crowns are red, their feathers white, and their feet blue, making them into little avian French flags as a bonus.

Veuve Clicquot is referred to in wine circles as ‘Yellow Label’, but this odd mismatch between orange and yellow can be attributed to a translation error. ‘Jaune’ means both yellow and yolk in French, and the aforementioned Bresse comparison caused some confusion that kept us from calling it ‘orange label’. Incidentally, there is no confusion among Veuve Clicquot’s lawyers, who pursue over 50 transgressions a year against their copyrighted shade.

These orange-yolked beauties are partially a result of breed, but primarily a function of the level of care and quality of feed given to the hens in question. Luckily, if you know where to look, you too can enjoy the same deeply orange hues that the Widow deemed worthy of adorning her bubbles.

I’ve drawn up this chart, with apologies to Rainbow Market’s identical data shown on their egg case, to outline the different factors that impact the quality of eggs in the Bay Area. Obviously, there are countless more farms that need to be added here; this is only the selection available at Rainbow. But it’s a start, and it brings to light more information than is made available at national supermarkets. Color coding here identifies good practices versus less desirable practices.

On this particular day, I chose a six-pack of ovaloid goodness from Clark Summit, one of the few farms to tick all the good boxes on the chart. Madame Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin would hopefully approve of their shade.